At the Tampa Museum of Art, dance leaves the stage and fills the gallery. Charles Atlas: Kiss the Day Goodbye, on view through Fall 2026, invites visitors into the luminous world of one of video art’s great pioneers.
The exhibition takes its title from Atlas’s 2015 two-channel video installation Kiss the Day Goodbye — 19 minutes and 15 seconds of color and sound, courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York — presented here in an installation view photographed by Paige Boscia.
Atlas’s influential career spans more than five decades. After moving to New York City in 1968, he began working with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in the early 1970s; a Super 8 film of a solo dancer, shot while on tour, inspired his life’s work. Together, Atlas and Cunningham forged ‘media-dance,’ a genre built on choreography created for film and video, where framing, sequencing and time heighten the emotion and narrative of movement.
Across nearly 40 years with Cunningham, and collaborations with figures from Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns to Michael Clark, Yvonne Rainer and Marina Abramović, Atlas’s work has traveled to the Venice Biennale and Tate Modern, with a comprehensive retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston in 2024. Tampa now gets its own close-up with a master of movement on screen.
Photo: Paige Boscia / Tampa Museum of Art
